UTARI: RIC Americas Member of the Week

The University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute (UTARI) specializes in developing advanced, affordable technology to help humanity in the performance of dirty, dull, dangerous, or difficult tasks in the home, workplace, and community. Led by Lt. General Rick Lynch (U.S. Army, Ret.), UTARI’s focus on assistive technology is concentrated in the areas of Advanced Manufacturing, Biomedical Technologies, and Robotics.

UTARI researchers work to provide smarter, safer autonomous robotics to aid those with disabilities, such as the elderly or wounded warriors; enable high-efficiency, low-cost production and reduce waste and downtime in manufacturing; and promote wound prevention and healing, medical training, and faster, more accurate diagnostics through biomedical technology research and development.

UTARI is currently making extensive use of ROS across a wide variety of robotic platforms. In UTARI’s Living Laboratory, for example, they are currently using ROS on the PR2 platform in order to develop capabilities that assist people with and without disabilities in a typical home setting. In the Unmanned Systems Lab, they are currently using ROS on a variety of mobile ground and aerial platforms.   In UTARI’s Assistive Robotics Lab, they are using ROS in systems such as the Kuka Youbot and Rethink Robotic’s Baxter robot. 

UTARI was a participant in last year’s SwRI ROS-Industrial training and recently joined the ROS-I consortium. The University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute looks forward to its participation in the ROS-Industrial project.

Read more at www.uta.edu/utari.

ROS Usage Survey Posted by OSRF

ROS-Industrial builds on ROS, extending it to factory automation applications. The ROS core and web site are maintained by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which also organizes the annual ROSCon event. OSRF support is a critical to the growth of the ROS community.

You have an opportunity to help OSRF and the ROS community: OSRF has created a blog post requesting that we fill out a ROS Usage Survey for them. Please take a few moments to respond to the survey. Thanks!

UT Austin NRG: RIC Americas Member of the Week

The Nuclear Robotics Group (NRG), an interdisciplinary research group associated with the Nuclear Engineering Teaching Laboratory (NETL), is headed by Dr. Mitch Pryor at the University of Texas at Austin. NRG uses industrial automation hardware to conduct graduate-level research targeting the energy sector. Because of NRG's experience with a variety of C++ based middleware for its research in the past, it made sense to begin using and contributing to ROS-Industrial over the past year as a Consortium member.

The ROS-Industrial team at SwRI enjoyed working with NRG researcher Dr. Brian O’Neil who spent summer 2012 developing a 3D object classifier that was used for the ROS-I Automate Demo. O’Neil’s work demonstrated how quickly academic research can transition to practical use on real industrial hardware. In a period of a few months, his idea was in practice on a heterogeneous dual manipulator system that demonstrated many of the core capabilities of ROS-Industrial.

NRG has recently released a Multiscale Teleoperation Demo video (below) that shows a natural user interface used to control an industrial robot. In the video, Ph.D. candidate Jack Thompson uses hand and arm motions to set waypoints for a simulated Motoman manipulator. A PrimeSense RGB-D sensor observes Thompson’s motions, and then his ROS/PCL-based software nodes interpret the motions and convert them to tool poses. What is unique: Thompson has a separate input control that scales the system’s sensitivity to his hand/arm motions. If he wants the robot to execute a small/delicate motion or a large macro-motion he is able to do so by scaling the sensitivity accordingly, making control of the system much more efficient. Up next, Thompson will being working with NRG’s Motoman SIA5 robots.

We look forward to more exciting accomplishments and collaborations with NRG.